How do I change my Lightsail plan?

Resolution

A Lightsail plan is also known as a Lightsail instance bundle. You can upgrade or downgrade your bundle.

Take the following actions when you change your Lightsail plan:

• Take a complete backup of your current Lightsail instance as a snapshot.
• Download the backup and then use SFTP to upload it to a new instance. Or, upload it to a data store such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Lightsail object storage.
• If you have a static IP address, then be sure to detach it from your old instance. Then, attach it to your new instance.
• For Linux instances with Bitnami stacks, check if there's an SSL certificate installed outside the /opt/bitnami directory. If there is, then you must manually copy the certificate to the new instance.
• Copy the credential files in the Bitnami instance from the old instance to the new one. These are credential files such as /home/bitnami/bitnami_credentials and /home/bitnami/bitnami_application_password.
• For all instances, confirm that any SSL certificates, application credentials, and configuration files are in the new instance.

Upgrade a bundle

To upgrade your Lightsail bundle to a larger instance, take a snapshot, and then create a larger instance from the snapshot.

Downgrade a bundle

It's not possible to automatically move from a larger Lightsail bundle to a smaller one. Lightsail stores data in fixed-sized SSD disks, and you can't downsize an SSD volume because that process can cause data loss and data corruption. To migrate to a smaller instance size, you must manually copy the site contents to a smaller instance.

To manually migrate to a smaller instance size, complete the following steps:

1. Create a new, smaller Lightsail instance.
2. Back up and restore the data from the old instance to the new instance.
   For Linux instances with Bitnami stacks, see Create and restore application backups on the Bitnami website. If this method doesn't fit your application, then contact your application's support team to understand how to move the data to a smaller instance.
   For Linux instances without Bitnami stacks, use tools such as rsync, scp, or tar to transfer your data and configuration files.
   For Windows instances, use Windows Server Backup, Robocopy, or other Windows-native backup tools to transfer your data and configuration files.

Related information

Extend the file system of your Windows Server instance in Lightsail